Category Archives: Stramonium

This blog is part of a series; its original title was “Heilkunst Basics: University, 4th Year (Seeing What’s Behind Your Timeline)”

Today, September the 11th, marks the anniversary of an event which continues to have a tremendous impact on our lives. There are so many dimensions to its meaning, and I will stick here to the direct medical impact, as I have seen through my patients, both at the time of the event itself, and in the years since.

At the time of the event itself, there was a tremendous amount of call-ins to the clinic from patients seeking all forms of emotional remedies, especially including shock and fear at first, and then shortly afterwards followed by the full spectrum of tonic (archetypal) emotional states. The range of acute anxiety remedies (including aconite, ignatia, and so on), and the primary tonic emotional archetypes represented by NSOL were dispensed frequently, and often in very high potencies due to the intensity of people’s experience at that time.

The individual components of NSOL are:

Natrum Muriaticum – for feelings of bereavement and loss, and ultimately for a challenge to someone’s core belief structure which questions whether people and the world in general can be trusted.

Staphysagria – for feelings of being victimized, or abused. Possibly for an anger without knowing exactly where or how to direct it.

Opium – for the root state of mind underneath many fears and anxieties. A kind of feeling “frozen in place”, like the dreams where someone is on a railway track, and cannot move a muscle.

Lachesis – for feelings of guilt, and a generally intense state of pent-up emotions looking for an outlet. Think of the image of a snake all charged up, and ready to strike out suddenly with its venomous tongue.

The NSOL combination is generally used quite a bit during a patient’s general Heilkunst treatment, and its individual components will be called for when they are emerging in a very distinct way on their own. NSOL, and its components, are very often used for treating specific shocks and traumas on a patient’s time line, as well as for dealing with the emotional reactions to situations occurring in the present.

The nature of the event of 9/11 certainly brought up many of these intense emotions, but it went much deeper than that. As is the case with anyone’s time line of shocks and traumas, the question of what is perceived as a trauma, and what it means to a given individual, will depend not just on the event itself, but on their underlying structure, in terms of their armoring structure combined with their belief structure. Two siblings, for example, who grow up in the same dysfunctional family dynamic can potentially have very different perceptions and reactions to it based on their underlying structures.

For many patients, this experience of 9/11 and its aftermath served as a catalyst to break through some of this deeper structure, and start to draw out some of their deeper chthonic issues, as well as higher ideogenic themes. The very nature of our world, as we perceive it, changed in many ways as a result. From a phenomenological point of view, when such an event of mass impact occurs, it represents a point in time where such a general shift in consciousness has, or is about to begin.

The next remedy within the hot stream series of the chthonic remedies is Stramonium. Where Belladonna is related to the physical body, Stramonium is related to a blockage of function in the etheric body. The core feeling in this remedy is of fear (as in all the chthonic remedies), but specifically linked to a feeling of being abandoned. The image of being left alone in the woods at night is a good image to visualize the feeling in this remedy.

This feeling recalls the movie The Blair Witch Project, which was a kind of a horror movie about three young men and women going to shoot a documentary in a supposedly haunted woods near their community. There actually was a witch haunting the woods, who conspired to draw them further and further into madness and ultimately their own demise. The way the movie was marketed, it wasn’t clear to me going in if it was fact, or fiction, and I got completely drawn into the feeling of terror as if it was real. There was also something about the hand-held camera technique which created a feeling of being there with the primary characters, running through the woods scared (some viewers complained that it made them nauseous).

This is a very common fear state seen in children who have an extremely difficult time at night, especially if they are alone in the dark. They either need night lights, or even the overhead light left on to sleep. They are also the ones who keep turning up in the parents bed, or need a parent to sleep with them in their own bed, otherwise the fear is too much for them to handle.

During the daytime, they may be full of behviours designed to attract attention, which continually draw the parents in closer (ie the subconscious drive to keep from being abandoned). These attention-seeking behaviours may alternate with inexplicable and uncharacteristic violent behviours, which attempt to fulfill this same purpose.

Stramonium may be needed after a severe fright, or possibly from an emotional event which might have raised fears of abandonment, such as a small child witnessing their parents fighting. It is often a very useful remedy for adults suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, such as after returning from active duty in the military.

Physical symptoms may include a variety of stomach aches, as well as spasms or cramps. These are also children who may suffer bed wetting. Stuttering is another classic symptom of this remedy, particularly where the onset followed a fright.